The invention relates to personal finance, and more particularly, to item categorization for use in consumers managing their personal finances, goals and budgets.
Consumers or shoppers purchase various goods and services at various times. For example, consumers purchase goods such as groceries and other consumables, office supplies, baby supplies, etc. These items may be purchased from various merchants such as a grocery store, restaurant, or a “big box” retailer such as TARGET store or retailer, WAL-MART store or retailer and COSTCO store or retailer. TARGET is a registered trademark of Target Brands, Inc., Minneapolis, Minn., WAL-MART is a registered trademark of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., Bentonville Ark., and COSTCO is a registered trademark of Costco Wholesale Membership, Inc., Issaquah, Wash.
Many consumers track their financial activities to manage their personal finances by collecting receipts, balancing a checkbook, or using a spreadsheet. Consumers also utilize number intensive financial management systems or finance programs and tools such as MINT financial management system, QUICKEN financial management system, QUICKBOOKS financial management system and FINANCEWORKS financial management system, which are available from Intuit Inc. MINT, QUICKEN, QUICKBOOKS and FINANCEWORKS are registered trademarks of Intuit Inc., Mountain View, Calif.
These types of financial management systems allow consumers or business owners aggregate, process and categorize financial data and present numerical data in various forms or summaries such as balances or values, charts, graphs and reports.
For example, MINT financial management system allows consumers to link their MINT financial management system account to various financial accounts at respective financial institutions so that MINT financial management system can receive transaction or account data from various financial institutions, and the consumer can view, aggregated checking, savings, loan, credit card, stock and data of other linked accounts in a centralized location using their computer or mobile communication device. In addition to providing a composite view of data of multiple accounts, data of linked accounts may also be categorized to provide a better understanding to the consumer regarding their finances.
While financial management systems have made significant improvements to assist users with managing their finances, there are some areas in which financial management systems can be improved, such as how transactions are categorized and how categorized data is processed for generating a financial summary or report. For example, it is not uncommon for consumers to purchase different types of items from a particular merchant, but a financial management system assigning a single category to the transaction based on the merchant since the financial management system may only see a line item transaction identifying the merchant and a transaction amount. Thus, individual items are not categorized since the information is missing from the line item data. Thus, while the financial management system knows the merchant involved in a transaction, categorization and subsequent generation of financial reports and summaries do not account for specific items purchased from that merchant. Consumers may manually enter the actual items purchased so that specific items are categorized, but this process can be inconvenient, tedious and time consuming.